Technology, Education and Children
We live in a World where digital technology plays an ever-increasing part in the most fundamental aspects of day-to-day life. Indeed, it could be said that our lives, as we live them now, could not exist were it not for technology.
With this being the case, it seems pretty much inevitable that children will come into contact with computers, phones, tablets, and whatever the next big thing is, to an ever-increasing extent. While there is talk about the damage that exposure to these technologies can do to the very young, however, there seems to be little or no question that, once children reach primary school age, and definitely once they are at high school, they will need access to them.
In this article, I will take you through my experience of technology growing up, I also examine the question of whether children should be allowed access to technology from a young age, as well as looking at how not having access may affect them in a technological age.
This post is largely unrelated to the main purpose of this site. It grew out of a short essay I wrote for one of my teachers, who wanted a young person’s perspective on education in a technological world. I publish it here as an aside, but an important aside. More than almost anything else I am going to write, I believe the subjects it covers are of vital importance in our world. The original, significantly shorter, essay can be found here.
My Experience
Before going any further with this article, I feel that it is important to discuss my experience of technology while growing up. This way, you will know all of my biases, and I have a base from which to build.
I was born in the early 2000s, and so when I was a young child few of the social media platforms that form so much of people’s internet activity today were widely used. Also, smartphones in the form that they exist today had not yet come about, meaning that many of the pressures associated with them were also not yet in existence.
Growing up, I was in an almost entirely technology free household. Mum had an ancient desktop computer in her room, but that was the full extent of it. We did not even have a television, although we did have a radio with a tape player. This is how it remained until I was fifteen, when I also acquired a desktop computer which was older than I was.
After completely dismantling the computer, cleaning all of its components, installing a network card and reassembling everything (at which point several components exploded and needed replacing), I found that it ran Windows XP, which was deprecated by that time and so not a secure operating system to be using. This led to a succession of different Linux distributions, beginning with the easier ones, such as Puppy Linux and Ubuntu, before moving on to the slightly more complex, including Debian and Fedora.
At age sixteen, I acquired my first phone, an old Nokia which could call, send texts and that was all. This and its successor I kept until I was twenty, when due to being away from family and friends, and in areas with no phone signal for long periods of time I finally decided to get a smartphone in order to be able to keep in contact.
When I was eighteen, it became apparent that I needed a computer that was slightly more up-to-date, and would enable me to use slightly more resource-heavy software. At that point, I bought a laptop (the same laptop I am writing this on), but not wanting to give up the ability to replace parts inherent to desktops, I made sure to get one with easily changeable parts. This laptop ran Windows 10, which while supported was very different to the Linux OSs that I had used previously, and so I again installed a succession of different distributions, including some of those I had used before, as well as more interesting ones such as Qubes, Arch, Kali, and Tails on a USB stick.
This was the point at which I became really interested in the potentials of my computer, as well as technology more generally, but also the time that I became concerned about the amount of personal data collected by technology companies under the guise of creating a ‘better user experience’. It was also at this point that I started down the path that would lead to me building and maintaining this website, as well as various servers, including an email server, a Matrix homeserver and a Nextcloud server.
We are now up to date. You are reading this article on my website, and since you are here, you are presumably looking at it from your computer, tablet or phone.
Lessons Learned from My Experience
When I talk to parents, and particularly to parents of children at Steiner schools, they are often concerned about how much time they should allow their children to spend ‘on screens’. This concern tends to be from different angles depending on whether the children in question attend Steiner schools or state schools, with the parents of those at the former thinking that their lack of technology use may harm their future prospects, while in the latter case there is often concern that it is used too much.
Based on my own experiences, and those of people who I know in a similar position, I can see no grounds for concern that limiting or removing access to technology for children, even up to their later teens, has any effect regarding requirements for technological literacy in adult life. The very fact that you are currently on a website for which I wrote much of the code is testament to that in itself. In addition, I would say that the majority of computer, phone and online activity (both in a school setting and at home) of children under the age of fourteen bears little or no resemblance to what is necessary in a work environment. Even in the case of wholely technology based jobs, such as those in IT, software development and pentesting, all of the necessary skills can be learnt from that age onwards, and I can see little evidence that having an ’early start’ has any positive effect in acquiring those skills. Particularly with regard to coding, how could you expect any self-respecting child to spend hours labouring over the intricacies of Java, C, or even Python when on that same machine they could be mindlessly watching Youtube videos, playing games or messaging friends?
Social Life
That very neatly brings me on to my next point. One of the arguments that I often hear is that without access to a smartphone, and thereby to calls, texts, Whatsapp and Messenger, it is difficult to have any kind of social life in the modern world. Beyond that, there is also the assertion that it is not safe to be without these means of contact.
To address the first point, what seems to be forgotten is that the ability to speak to people is not in itself a social life. Especially since the lockdowns of the past couple of years, and all of the Zoom meetings and other general video calls that they entailed, there is a general assumption amongst a large part of the population that communicating digitally has the same inherent value as meeting in person. This is fundamentally untrue, especially for children, for whom in-person interaction plays not only an important social function but also an essential developmental role that technology simply cannot achieve. Do we not constantly hear about the necessity of sending children to nursery or kindergarten and then to school for this very reason? The value of modern communication is that it makes the process of arranging to meet up easy, not that it removes the need to do so. As such, it should be the role of parents to arrange meetings for their children, as they will be the ones to facilitate them happening. In my opinion the only reason for arguing anything else is laziness on the part of the parents in question.
On the subject of safety, my argument is simple. For hundreds of years children have managed without having a distress-signal-in-waiting in their pockets. Why should it be any different now? “Yes,” you might say, “but our world is much more dangerous than it was then.” This is a very common argument, but I have yet to find any evidence that it is true. Yes, our roads might be busier, but will having a phone make any difference to this fact? It is also often said that a phone is necessary to make arrangements to be picked up, or to find someone in a busy place. To this I would make pretty much the same argument. What is wrong with making your plans in advance and sticking to them? If this is all really too scary, then the logical answer would be to use a non-smart phone, what when I was little was called a mobile phone. I can see no reason why a smartphone is an imperative to keep in contact.
Peer Pressure
One of the most difficult aspects of negotiating the path of how much technological access to allow children is the presence of peer pressure and what has come to be known as ‘fear of missing out’. All children experience these two forces in many aspects of their lives, and from my experience it is always a challenge to parents when they do, especially when it comes to technology. Between the ages of eight and fourteen, I experienced both very strongly and would frequently express the fact to Mum, leading to her having to be quite strong to maintain the decision she had made. At the time, the fact that she did was very difficult for me, as it meant that I was not able to take part in discussions about the latest computer games, or Minecraft, when the subject came up amongst my friends and classmates. In hindsight, however, I am very grateful that things worked the way they did, as I definitely had a happier and more fulfilling childhood as a result.
Interest in the World
As a general rule for the children who I know and have known, including when I myself was a child, I have noticed a strong correlation between easy access to technology and a reduced enthusiasm for and interest in the world around them. There could be any number of reasons for this, but to me it seems that the most likely is a combination of the easy sensory stimulation of a computer or phone being difficult to match in the real world, and the somewhat addictive nature of these technologies meaning that, even whilst engaged in other activities their minds are continually on what they will do on their device when they get home. These are also noticeable in adults, but for children, for whom every waking moment is a learning experience, this is much more detrimental.
Computer use in Schools
This brings me to the increasing use of computers in schools to do research, and provide quizzes and other things of a similar nature to pupils. In the case of the latter, as well as their use for typing essays and other pieces of work, I can see little or no practical purpose in requiring, or even allowing this to be the case. The ability to write with a pen or pencil on sheets of paper is an invaluable skill, and one that is much harder to acquire, and certainly to do well, than hitting computer keys. It also forms a much more fundamental part of human communication than typing, and is a skill with a much broader set of applications in day-to-day life. In the case of young children, the mixing of paper-based and computer-based work will almost inevitably give a greater liking for the latter, as it requires so much less concentration and skill, and is so much easier. Even for teenagers and adults, it is important to write rather than type. There is some evidence that the ability to write creatively, and thereby to provide interesting material for those reading the writing, is much lower when writing onto a computer than when writing onto paper, and also that information read from a page is much more likely to be remembered than that read from a screen. It saddens me that it is becoming increasingly difficult to provide, and also to read, work in written form, and I will always insist on doing so wherever possible. Even this article, which unfortunately is to be published to my website, and consumed only in digital form, I wrote out in its entirety on paper before typing it up. I can see no good reason for teachers to require the submission of digital material, rather than handwritten, and to even allow it has appeared to me in most, although not all, cases to be largely as a result of laziness, or of their own inability to stop using their computers.
I would add here that I am speaking about what is normally true. There are obviously going to be exceptions to what I say, possibly most notably in cases a child finds significant difficulty in writing, but is able to express themself through typing.
Privacy and Security
My final point is much less related to health and welbeing, and is more practical. In the current world, with all of the massive technology companies and the increasing tendency for people to share every aspect of their lives with anyone who might choose to look, we are presented with a huge array of problems relating to personal privacy and security.
If children are introduced to technology too early, it is highly likely that they will have no idea of the problems that online connectivity produces. On the more mundane end of the spectrum, they are likely to sign up for social media accounts in their true names, use weak passwords and provide a huge amount of information that can be used to determine their home address, names and professions of their parents, and most aspects of their lives. For most, this will not prove to have a negative impact, as the world is usually a pretty safe place, and if parents are in a position where having details publicly available is a problem, they are likely to closely monitor their children’s online activity to make sure that it is not exposed. There are cases, however, where it might have unforeseen consequences at some future time, either for the parents, children, or other people who happen to be caught up.
To take my own case. For the last couple of years, I have been involved in OSINT (open source inteligence/information) investigations into a number of different people, organisations and events. This has given me a broad range of experience both in how easy it is to establish a large amount of information based on what people post online, and also how vital it is to keep available information to a minimum when engaged in this kind of work. I always say that given any two pieces of information about a person, I will be able to give you their home address, the places they were educated, their current employer and quite possibly even access to their online accounts (although I would never access them or enable others to do so.) There have been very few cases when this has not been true. Now, I am by no means saying that the majority of today’s children will end up doing online investigations (it would be a sad thing for our society if they did), but what this has shown me is that it would only take a very small thing to go wrong before you could end up with all of your personal affairs being trawled through by internet trolls.
In terms of computer security, again, it is hard to expect children to be fully versed in what is necessary to prevent their (or your) computer or phone being taken over by hackers, or getting ransomeware or some other type of malware installed on it. Nomatter how much you say only to visit trusted websites or install only vetted software, the allure of visiting a site to play a game or find out some piece of information, or of installing the latest hit game onto the computer always has the potential to be stronger. Criminals are clever, and it is very easy to accidentally end up clicking the wrong link or installing a malicious version of legitimate software (to give a very benign example, if you click this link I will get some information about your computer).
Conclusion
You might come away from this article having been made to think. You might come away simply judging me to be a highly reactionary person who is bitter about others having more access to technology than I did myself. Whichever is the case, I do hope that you will consider your own use of technology, and what that of your children, present or future, should be.
If you take nothing else away from reading this, the most important is simply that I am glad that I grew up with things the way they were. Whatever my perceived trials and difficulties along the way, I am glad that I grew up in a relatively technology free environment, that friends played video games whilst I did not, and that I was not forced to succumb to the pressures of a digital world before adulthood. Perhaps most of all, I am glad that I was prevented from creating a massive digital footprint beyond my control before I understood the implications of doing so.